Relax, it’s (not) just a breathing monitor headset

A headset which monitors the quality of your breathing is being developed by BreathResearch, a San Francisco Bay area start-up.

Combined with a mobile app, the ‘Breath Acoustics’ headset listens to your breathing and analyzes the patterns. Sensor-based breath monitoring may be a less commonly monitored biometric pattern but recent studies suggest it could be used to detect stress levels, bacterial infections and other conditions. The headset also presents other biometric data, including heart rate, pulse oximetry, and respiration.

The idea is that we can begin to de-stress a little more when presented with what is hopefully actionable data. Or for the fitness enthusiasts among us, important metabolic thresholds can be gauged to improve performance and recover from injury or illness.

The company has already released a mobile app, called MyBreath that measures and tracks breathing using a regular headset, but now hopes to provide even more comprehensive and accurate breathing analysis with its new headset. Earlier this month, they launched a crowdfunding campaign for the device which has currently raised over 50% of its $30,000 target. Read more in GigaOM and PSFK.

Our definitions

Telehealth and Telecare Aware posts pointers to a broad range of news items. Authors of those items often use terms 'telecare' and telehealth' in inventive and idiosyncratic ways. Telecare Aware's editors can generally live with that variation. However, when we use these terms we usually mean:

• Telecare: from simple personal alarms (AKA pendant/panic/medical/social alarms, PERS, and so on) through to smart homes that focus on alerts for risk including, for example: falls; smoke; changes in daily activity patterns and 'wandering'. Telecare may also be used to confirm that someone is safe and to prompt them to take medication. The alert generates an appropriate response to the situation allowing someone to live more independently and confidently in their own home for longer.

• Telehealth: as in remote vital signs monitoring. Vital signs of patients with long term conditions are measured daily by devices at home and the data sent to a monitoring centre for response by a nurse or doctor if they fall outside predetermined norms. Telehealth has been shown to replace routine trips for check-ups; to speed interventions when health deteriorates, and to reduce stress by educating patients about their condition.

Telecare Aware's editors concentrate on what we perceive to be significant events and technological and other developments in telecare and telehealth. We make no apology for being independent and opinionated or for trying to be interesting rather than comprehensive.